This generation of distributed services has helped power the growth of mobile devices and the app-store economy. The days of building applications that do not leverage services on the network are dwindling. Apple’s new mobile feature, Siri, is a great example that employs a large number of service providers in real time on highly distributed infrastructure. The B2B software and services, such as Salesforce and Amazon, are also aggressively building out cloud applications and services on this architecture.

Distributed services require high-performance components to keep average response times very low (100 milliseconds or less). Many of the client apps and users of these apps are located around the world. This typically requires the replication of services across a number of regions to provide a consistent experience. Sometimes this can be supported with local read caches but many times both read and write operations need to be supported by service instances across multiple regions. The instances of these services therefore need to support some type of synchronization and support for read and write operations to maintain state.

Any number of business models have been built around the exchange of data on daily, weekly and monthly intervals, but scheduling processes to produce results in the future can be a significant barrier to today’s computing, mobile, Web and application needs with the increased connectivity of businesses and consumers.

There are many opportunities to better leverage existing data assets and services in a larger ecosystem by providing real-time access through APIs. A great example of this vision is Netflix, which provided a real-time API for its consumer accounts and content. It has been so successful that it is working on the next version. Today Netflix serves more than a billion requests per day, with peak loads of over 20k requests per second.

Storage IO performance is critical to scale these real-time services while keeping your level of service consistent. Your storage architecture can impact the performance of these services both operationally as well as capture and report service usage for analytics and optimization.

Now is the time to leverage business assets — data, services, etc. — as real-time services. In doing so, you will find new business opportunities, provided you have infrastructure that can scale up and out for the large data demands of today and tomorrow.

Organizations are increasingly considering the opportunity to implement a digital workforce of software robots to take on administrative, back-office processes and transform the way we work on a global scale. ... More >>

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